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Posts published by Yasmine Mousa

Like many others, I was intrigued by the attention the film “American Sniper” was getting. I knew I was treading murky waters, but I decided to follow the herd and see the movie. Unlike most people in the crowd, I had a very personal stake in the film. “American Sniper” takes place in Iraq, my homeland, which I left shortly after the American-led invasion that Chris Kyle took part in. So the film, powerful and sad, left me with mixed thoughts and reminiscences.

Falluja — where much of the movie takes place — was, for American troops, a city of demons and horror. But before the 2003 invasion, during the years of the embargo against Iraq, Falluja was known as little more than a transit hub frequented by travelers heading to the western border with Jordan – as well as for its tasty kebab. Three days before the invasion, a group of five teenagers from Baghdad, my son among them, drove there after midnight for a late meal. It was the norm. Nobody was hurt.

When I was back in Baghdad in 2010, I found that my skills on the very roads where I had learned to drive were no longer viable because of traffic jams caused by checkpoints and blast walls. I had to be transported around by a cast of fearful drivers. One driver, Sa’ad, told me quietly one day, “I cannot serve you tomorrow.” When I asked why, he replied that he had to go to Hilla — about 70 miles south of Baghdad — to bring the children of his dead brother to their grandmother’s home. His eyes were teary.

In 2006, his brother, he and a cousin were in a car that broke down near an American base. While the three were leaning under the car’s hood, trying to fix the engine, someone – perhaps an American sniper – shot and killed the brother and cousin. Shielded from the sniper’s sight by the car, Sa’ad was spared.

“His head was on the radiator, and I was too scared to do anything,” Sa’ad said, sobbing. After the killing of her husband, Sa’ad’s sister-in-law moved with her children to her parents’ house in Hilla.

Then I remembered attending a doctor’s funeral in Amman in 2006. He had been shot in the head, apparently by an American soldier, while driving home from his clinic in Baghdad. The air conditioning was on in his car at the time, so he did not hear orders to stop. The doctor was 62. “We are very sorry,” his wife said the Americans told her son afterward. “Sorry will not bring him back,” she said, crying.

Sa’ad must have noticed my distraught face as he told me about his brother. “Sniper attacks, as much as they feel personal and painful, are a trivial fraction of the war,” he said. “What if I tell you about the victims of random killings, mortar attacks, raids, crossfires and explosions.” Since Sa’ad is the paternal uncle, he is obligated to support his late brother’s family.

“We leave it to God, the greatest avenger,” he said.

In the movie, I could not understand the connection between Iraq and 9/11 for people like Chris Kyle. Like many people in Iraq, I had not heard of Al Qaeda until the United States was attacked that day, even though I was working as a press officer at a European embassy.

On July 19, 2003, my daughter, son and I left Baghdad. Baghdad International Airport was under the control of the United States military, and it was allowing it to be used only for military purposes. So Iraqis had to make the 10-hour drive to Amman. At the border, an American soldier stood guard. He was barely 18, pimples filling his ruddy baby face.

“I just want to speak with someone,” he said, popping his head into our passenger-side window. “I have not spoken with anyone for a week now.”

I felt sorry for him, a stranger in this desert. I wondered out loud what had brought him here. He said he was trying to pay for college.

About 4,500 American soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis lost their lives to this war, not to mention those who were left with long-term disabilities. The Iraqi diaspora caused by the American-led invasion is among the largest in modern history. The first question Iraqis who were in Iraq in 2003 ask one another when connecting on social media is: “Which country are you in?” No family has been left untouched.

You might think that, after all these years and after all the tears and changes of jobs, cities, countries and even nationalities, I would have become desensitized to the war. But the movie made me realize that I am not. Evidently, the scars of those days will remain with me forever.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003. She is also a certified translator and interpreter.

When I first set foot at Baghdad International Airport in March 2010 to work for The New York Times, I was no stranger to Iraq. Until 2003, Baghdad had been my home. I still had family and friends here, and they remained dear to me, and I to them.

Here, I had experienced wars, so many I almost lost count. Here was where I weathered it all, the good with the fear, yet never lost hope. I wish I still felt that way today.

On my first few days back in 2010, I found it hard to believe that all these foreign media bureaus were operating in the heart of Baghdad, without being scrutinized by government minders.

By the 1980s in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, foreign businesses, schools and organizations had almost disappeared from the local scenery, apart from a small diplomatic corps. Anyone who had contact with a foreign person was required to report to Iraqi intelligence. I worked as a press officer for a European embassy. But unlike many of my peers, the intelligence agency’s attempts to recruit me failed: I refused to cooperate.

As the drums of war were getting loud in the fall of 2002, the notorious intelligence agency did not put up with me anymore. They notified the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the ministry sent a letter to the embassy where I worked, requiring that my employment be terminated (although it was the embassy that had hired and paid me.) I remember that the attaché at the time said, “If it was in another place, I would sue.” I did not understand what he meant. I recall thinking, “Sue whom?”

Still, I later realized that things could have been worse, that I could have “gone missing without a trace,” rather than just losing my job.

This was not my first encounter with the Iraqi intelligence agency. In 1994, I opened a school for English. A couple of years later, after wrapping up an evening class, two men in beige suits sneaked into my office. My heart skipped a beat as soon as I saw them. “Mrs. Yasmine,” one of them said. I answered with a shaky “Yes?” They did not waste time. “We heard that you are teaching youngsters the language of the 30-state aggression led by the U.S.” Then I understood. The wounds of the 1991 Persian Gulf war were still fresh. “Our children were deprived of the things they asked for, from lollipops to ice cream to satchels.” All because of the “mean” embargo imposed on our country.

The brief meeting drained more energy than my long day’s work. I asked them to give me a couple of weeks to close down. It was a troubling day followed by many troubled nights when their pudgy faces revisited me in my sleep.

Photo

Yasmine Mousa at the Great Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq in 2010.Credit Shiho Fukado

During my first days back in 2010, the scary, heavily mustachioed, tan-suited figures I was once accustomed to were nowhere to be seen. I wondered, why do I feel more terrorized now than I was back then?

My marital home for almost 20 years was not far from The Times’s Baghdad bureau. I know the area like the palm of my hand. Until February 2003, an old friend and I used to briskly walk its alleys. Yet I was too scared to step outside the bureau’s premises. Today, the stakes are even higher. Violence comes without letters or visits or any warning at all, but in the form of explosions, kidnapping and targeted killings.

Ten years later, Iraq remains hostage to an ill-fated decision.

If there is no room left in this land for despair, is there any room for repair? Can we reclaim what is probably already lost? Or was the latest intervention by the United States the straw that broke the camel’s back? I do not know. But I know this: for so many years I had dreamed of an Iraq free of Mr. Hussein. Now he is gone, yet I cannot enjoy it.

Yasmine Mousa works as a life-skills counselor for immigrants and a translator and journalist in Toronto. She worked as a newsroom manager and interpreter for The Times in Baghdad in 2010 and 2011.

TORONTO — How much Iraq, my home country, has changed. And I know all too well that the changes did not happen overnight. It was, and is, systematic destruction, and for me it started three decades ago during the run up to Baghdad’s last planned summit.

Back then, in 1981, I was a newly graduated civil engineer working on the V.V.I.P.B. – Very, Very Important Persons Building — at Baghdad International Airport, a project that was a symbol of glory, abundance and growth as Iraq prepared itself to host a 1983 conference of Non-Aligned Movement nations, a prestigious event during the cold war.

We Iraqi engineers were constantly encouraged by our seniors to learn from the overseas construction companies supervising the airport, and other projects. Baghdad was one large workshop.

Saad Shalash/ReutersWorkers transported building materials to repair the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad in October2010. The hotel was one of six undergoing restoration ahead of the Arab League summit planned for March of this year. The summit has twice been postponed.

To this day, rusty flagpoles stand in the courtyards of Baghdad’s major hotels. They are reminders of a promising future that never materialized.

In 1983, Baghdad was to host a conference of nonaligned-movement nations, an honor that would, everyone hoped, restore some of the Abbasid-era glory of the city.

The conference never happened. Iraq was, as it has been for the past 30 years, at war. The escalation of the Iran-Iraq conflict — Baghdad fell within Iran’s missile range — scared everyone away.

And now, after more than three decades and three devastating wars, Baghdad is hoping to reinvent itself by hosting yet another event: the Arab League summit meeting.

Subsequently, some of Baghdad’s main streets and hotels are undergoing intensive rehabilitation.

Back in January, Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, reassured Iraqi officials during an official visit to Baghdad that the summit meeting would be held in Baghdad. But because of Baghdad’s precarious security situation, the level of representation was inconclusive.

Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesA bazaar in Erbil, part of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

ERBIL, Iraq — On a recent trip to the Kurdistan region in the north of Iraq, duty required us to drive to a place here in its capital that we didn’t know. My colleagues and I, all Iraqis, stopped by the first police officers we spotted, naturally enough, to ask for directions. We asked in Arabic, then I tried in English.

The young officer did understand us, which is how I discovered the language barrier that is slowly emerging here, dividing the country not only linguistically, but also generationally.

We were in Iraq, so we presumed that Arabic remained the common language, but the trip to the Kurdish region, my first since before the war, taught me that Arabic will only go so far.

A pattern emerged. Person after person, especially the young, spoke almost exclusively Kurdish, struggling with Arabic if they spoke any at all. This, too, is a legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule. After the Persian Gulf war in 1990-91, the international community created a protectorate for the Kurds in the north, patrolled by aircraft in the “no fly” zones.

The region, nominally autonomous since the 1970s under the Baath Party, began to separate itself from the central authority in Baghdad. The Kurdish language’s revival became part of a broader move toward freedom, if not independence outright. Read more…

BAGHDAD — One day not long ago, as the sun shone relentlessly, several hundred Muslims gathered here in the Imam al-Adham Mosque to hold a special prayer associated with times of crisis.

The prayer, in Arabic, is called Salat al-Istisqaa, and it is rarely held. It seeks neither mercy nor an end to violence, but rather divine intervention in another of the scourges that afflicts this country: the lack of rain.
Outdoors, on a white marble terrace, the mosque’s imam, Ahmed Hassan al-Taha, led the prayer. According to tradition, the worshipers wore a piece of their clothing inside out – to symbolize God’s ability to change bad things to good. “From bad times come virtuous times,” he said.

In Iraq, in Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the once abundant supply of water has become increasingly scarce. With the rates of rainfall dropping significantly, Iraq, in addition to everything else, has endured a dry period for the last decade, with the situation becoming particularly severe for the last four years.

The impact has devastated the country’s agriculture – from livestock to the dates that made the country famous. It was said that 30 million date palms lined the rivers from the north to the Persian Gulf. Many are withering away now.

“When the deprived raise their hands to the sky and pray, God Almighty will not let them down,” Imam Ahmed prayed, calling the drought “an additional plight” in the nation’s suffering. As he spoke, military helicopters roared overhead, an unnecessary reminder of a war still not finished.

People here are deeply spiritual, seeking solace in faith and forbearance in prayer. The worshipers answered, “Amen,” as pigeons circled in the sunny sky and the imam repeated: “God water us.”

The prayer, though specially held for rain, has for many Muslims become a ritual to address other crises, too. The last time the mosque held it was in 2006 at the height of the sectarian strife then tearing Iraq apart. In the 1990s, one of Saddam Hussein’s deputies, Izzat al-Douri, to this day a leader of the insurgency, once led a similar prayer as international sanctions began to bite.

One hasn’t been held for rain in years – which some might tell you is part of the problem.

Scientists, naturally, are skeptical. They attribute the drought to more earthly concerns, including climate change, decades of water mismanagement and the damming of Iraq’s great rivers at their headwaters in Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Abdullah al-Obaidi, a meteorologist at Baghdad University, said Iraq suffered even now from its decades of war, especially Mr. Hussein’s orders to drain the marshes of southern Iraq to stamp out a Shiite rebellion after the disastrous invasion of Kuwait in 1990. “Those marshes served as air coolers for the climate,” he said.

Whatever the explanation, three days after the special prayer, it began to rain and then rain more, a welcome respite after a long dry year. Like many, the prime minister of the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, Barham Salih, expressed relief – in his case, in a message on Twitter.

“It has been raining,” he wrote, “for the past 24 hours – better late than never.”

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who works for The New York Times in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — “It was a quiet day,” I said to myself. It was not one of those days when the Baghdad bureau’s several telephone lines ring nonstop, bringing news of explosions and killing. The weather was glorious, there were no heatwaves or blinding sandstorms.

All except for a few sporadic phone calls: an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D, in the Ghazaliya neighborhood, wounding one person. I guess that was ok. Then we learned that another I.E.D. had exploded north of Baquba, targeting an American convoy and wounding one person.

An hour later we learned that another had exploded near the Shaab soccer stadium, wounding one. In the course of the afternoon two more exploded in Tuz Khurmato in Kirkuk, north of Baghdad, killing one. By the end of the day a sticky bomb attached to a car killed a bystander in Falluja, west of Baghdad.

A quiet day elsewhere is a day when no lives are lost and tears shed. But this is the Baghdad of today, where logic rarely applies.

I remembered how on my first day in the Times newsroom back in March, I was about to cry when I read on the news board that two civilians had been killed by a roadside bomb. Later I witnessed scores of bloody days tainted with dozens, and sometimes more than a hundred, lost lives. Then I went abroad again, and have just returned.

Yes, today was a calm day.

It is a fact hard to endure, but maybe people change, and come to terms with their situation. As the Arab proverb goes, “Whoever witnesses death, consents to fever.”

Ayman Oghanna for The New York TimesIraqi women window shopping at a jewelry store in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — Overlooking a conspicuously unfit-for-purpose road stands a modern women’s boutique, its spotless marble tile flooring a contrast to the good for nothing graveled highway. As soon as irritable customers pass through the sparkling double-glass doors they leave the outside squalor behind, and their mood instantly changes.

Inside, temperatures dip swiftly to a comfortable level, while in its style and layout the store could easily be mistaken for a trendy Lebanon boutique in downtown Beirut.

In spite of the unsettled situation in Baghdad, new businesses have started to open, indeed are thriving. Even amid the relative lapse in security, the affluent private sector is stepping in, taking bold initiatives.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003. In March she wrote about her return to Baghdad to work for The New York Times. Here she records impressions of her first trip back to Canada.

NIAGARA FALLS, Canada — My friend called me and asked casually, “How about I pick you up in a couple of hours?” We went to our usual coffee place.

She had been to New York recently. I had been to Baghdad, where I grew up but left soon after the 2003 invasion. She told me that she had nearly missed a Broadway show that she booked in advance. I told her that I had narrowly missed a roadside bomb.

When my fellow Iraqis, those who are still living abroad, ask me about Baghdad, I let them know how Abu Nuwas street is no longer the wasteland it used to be, how the River Tigris itself has been cleaned up. Of course there are still bombs and killings, but my friends are living in a different world now, and I don’t want to worry them.Read more…

Holly Pickett for The New York TimesA small park in Qadisiya neighborhood adds a touch of green space in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — I was driving past Qadisiya Park and I saw six shiny white banners strung tree to tree. The banners read, in neat blue and green print, “We urge Baghdad City Hall not to turn Qadisiya Park into a commercial plaza.” It was signed by “The people of Qadisiya district.”

So began protests, arguments and shouting in the park itself, and letters to City Hall. This act may seem normal elsewhere in the world, but not amid the mayhem of Baghdad, a city where sticky bomb explosions are a regular occurrence amid piles of uncollected trash. Protests and raising banners were unheard of under the previous regime.

The dispute is over plans to build a plaza on land that is currently a green park, with two floors of residential apartments above.

Yaseen Ghazi, who wants to build on the disputed land, claims that his family has obtained consent from the Ministry of Finance, and has all the legal documents to verify it.

Residents want to preserve the green space in a hot city, where long blackouts and electricity shortages are still the norm. “Look at it, just imagine what it would look like. Instead of these lovely flowers, there will be high concrete walls,” said Abu al-Hassan, who lives in a nearby house. “We just don’t want this commercial building. This is why we raised those banners, and we will take all the measures we have to through Baghdad City Hall to keep it as it is.”

The banners did not last long. I drove past one day later, and they were gone. It did not take long to find out why.

“I burned them. I pulled down all the banners in the evening and I burnt them. Yes I did, here,” said Mr. Ghazi, the would-be developer, stomping the ground for emphasis. “Look at it,” he continued, pointing to the park. “What good is it? While we want to build a plaza, which people can benefit from, they are just a bunch of losers, who have nothing to do, just create problems for others.”

He seems unlikely to get his way. Hakeem Abdul Zahra, a spokesman for Baghdad City Hall, said that a final decision has been taken, to keep the park. Even though it originally belonged to the Ministry of Finance and was designated as a commercial lot, the city authorities refused to grant a building license to maintain the green area. “There is a directive from Baghdad City Hall to increase the green areas, in Baghdad,” said Thawra Ahmed al-Dulaimi, a municipal administrator.

“What makes our job difficult is that people have no fear or respect to authority anymore. Therefore lawlessness has prevailed,” said Ms. al-Dulaimi.

Yet in a city whose identity has been lost to unruliness and disarray, Qadisiya Park is one glimpse of a system where what is normal in the rest of the world, can also work here.

The first time I sat in the passenger seat, I unconsciously reached out to fasten my seat belt. In an anxious tone the driver said: “What are you doing? They will know that you are a foreigner.” I did not question who “they” were or why, I simply unfastened. And took to the road.

Baghdad roads used to rarely struggle with traffic jams because of the city’s wide roads and good public transportation system. I recall an Egyptian friend once telling me back in the nineties, “Every time I return from Cairo to Baghdad I am under the impression that a curfew has been imposed.”

Now I find myself on roads where the traffic knows no rules or regulations; Baghdad is now infamous for traffic jams, and fury at the nearest driver has become the norm. At first, in an attempt to calm things down I advised my driver to give way. Out of politeness he listened to my plea. The third time, he said, “Because of you, we will arrive tomorrow.” I swallowed the scolding and decided to keep quiet for the rest of the trip.

Suddenly on the sun-scorched road a man with a bottle of some transparent liquid ran toward a car. The driver stepped out, promptly took the bottle, tapped the bottle man on the shoulder as an act of gratitude and handed him a bundle of cash. I asked the driver what they were doing. He explained that the driver had run out of gas and that the bottle-man came to the rescue.

Now in Baghdad checkpoints are the rule. Police have started to make them look more like offices than the street, decorating them with shelves stacked with their files, plastic flowers, benches and chairs.

Even though I recognize that Mesopotamia is the land of prophets and miracles, what was passing in front of me — a minibus packed with passengers, steering without a driver — was a bit too much. Eventually, I noticed a head, barely popping out of the driver’s window. It was no miracle after all; apparently a 15-year-old had decided to take charge! No drivers’ licenses have been issued since the invasion in 2003; therefore an underage driver can enjoy a blast in the roads of Baghdad.

When I expressed my astonishment over the swaying/no yield, sliding/no stop driving policy, the driver politely asked, “Do you know how to drive?”

I replied, “Yes.”

The passenger in the back seat then asked, “Do you have a license?”

“I have a Canadian license,” I replied.

They both responded with contempt, “Then you don’t know how to drive.”

Obtaining a license is a stigma, implying here that you don’t know how to drive. So a driver gets honked at for trying to slow down at a red light, and using the left and right turn signals is considered, as one driver described it, “sissy conduct.”

KARADA, Baghdad — At times of crisis people resort to religion, especially the most vulnerable. A holy place among the alleyways of Iraq’s capital, the Sayyed Idrees shrine is a spiritual gathering place where women take comfort and encouragement. It may be among the few public locations in the city where women outnumber men.

Women enter the shrine on Sunday afternoons to seek healing and help with the responsibilities that have fallen upon their shoulders. Some are ill, others have lost children to violence or disease.

They come to the shrine to pray, to read the Koran and to share their experiences with each other, sitting in small groups in the shrine’s cool interior, even sleeping for a while in the embrace of the air-conditioned hall. They focus on the personal — children, health, marriage, work, happiness.

BAGHDAD — I was at the house of an old friend last week. As is often the case in Baghdad these days, we were chatting about the long-delayed formation of a new Iraqi government. Her husband interrupted us. He is a Shiite Muslim, who lost cousins under the government of Saddam Hussein. But he was not sectarian, and he was not happy. He said he preferred a government that looks beyond sect.

“Don’t I have a point?” he asked.

He did. And I thought back to a question my mother, long ago, asked her father. “Why is it that the government is mostly Sunnis?”

My grandfather, a well known merchant at the time, answered her patiently. “There is an undefined code between the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq that the Sunnis mostly dedicate themselves to the government and military, while trade, farming and craftsmanship is the Shiites’ forte,” he said.

ReutersIraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, second and third from left, last week at the reopening of the Foreign Ministry building.

The occasion was the rehabilitation of the Foreign Ministry, badly damaged in a large-scale attack nine months ago. Ambassadors and reporters were invited for the occasion. “The rise from ashes is symbolic, it is not a promotion to the ministry, it is a promotion to the Iraqi people in defying their enemy” the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said in his welcoming speech.

At the ministry’s auditorium, the two back rows were allocated for the press. I watched the Iraqi, Arabic and Western news media set up their equipment — a major change from Saddam’s days when there were barely four state newspapers and two state channels. The ladies of the ministry were in professional black attire responding politely to their guests. There was much last minute vacuuming, odor-freshener spraying, carpet laying and foliage arranging. The ambiance felt like proof of a free and secured Iraq.

I was taking notes when I looked up to see the people in the front row stand up. I soon realized that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was arriving. His entry was swift, void of the pomp or applause that marked a dignitary’s entrance to an official event in pre-2003 Baghdad. Shortly, an ambassador entered, right after the prime minister, yet another, unthinkable breach of the old protocol around a leader.

Khalid Mohammed/Associated PressTruck bombs detonated on Aug. 19, 2009, at the Foreign Ministry, above, and the Finance Ministry. The attacks left at least 95 dead and nearly 600 wounded.

Mr. Maliki’s speech was mainly about combating terrorism; he referred to terrorists as “crows of evil.”

“We have moved from the phase of defense to hounding them,” he said. “Today is a happy day and a message to whomever intends to destroy life in Iraq. This day expresses determination, patriotic willingness and a strong Iraqi stance in encountering the fiercest terrorist attack a state has been subjected to in the whole world.”

“Which country in the world faced such savageness, nonetheless was able to stand up so fast?” he asked.

Mr. Zebari, the foreign minister, thanked all the countries that lent a hand in either the reconstruction of the ministry, like the United States Embassy and the American military, or received the ministry’s wounded, like Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Germany, France and Spain.

The dean of the diplomatic corps’ cordial speech was mostly about optimism.

A short documentary showed the foreign minister on the day of the attack amid a cloud of white smoke, pledging to rehabilitate the building in record timing, and “even better than before,” he said. The rehabilitation cost was $10 million.

The Iraqi national orchestra played the national anthem.

The next interlude, the ribbon cutting, took place in a different building. As soon as we stepped out, each diplomat was escorted with their private team of body guards while helicopters circled intensely in the air.

The ceremony included the release of 72 white doves, after the number of lives claimed from the ministry since 2003; there was also a bronzed mural engraved with the names of the dead. That “Black Wednesday,” as Mr. Zebari referred to it, a truck rigged with two tons of explosives blew up close to the ministry. The explosion claimed the lives of 42 and wounded 562 employers from the Foreign Ministry alone.

“The biggest attack on a civilian target” Mr. Zebari said. The other ministry employees were killed in explosions, assassinations or kidnappings.

During the moment of silence, I wondered how many more moments would we need to honor all our dead. Since my arrival in Baghdad, there have been Black Mondays, Black Fridays, Bloody Sundays and Embassies Days — all days marred by death and destruction.

While weighing the sacrifices, all the marvel of the celebration evaporated.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003 and recently returned to Baghdad, where she works for The New York Times. She writes about the changes in her country in Back in Iraq, with Fresh Eyes.

Jassim Mohammed/Associated PressDozens of Iraqi couples lined up outside the Hunting Club for a mass wedding on July 22, 1993, as they did every Thursday in Iraq’s capital. The efficiency wedding idea was the idea of Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Odai, as an austerity measure in response to three years of U.N sanctions.

BAGHDAD — It was my day off, so, my mother invited me for coffee at the Iraqi Hunting Club. At first I was not very enticed, so as not to fall into the depressing comparisons of the place yesterday and today.

But my qualms subdued as soon as I passed through the main architectural entrance, which at times was no more than a plain rusty iron gate, to the parking lot with its bright yellow and orange canopies, instead of the nothing that used to be there.

In Baghdad, apart from some tentative attempts by individuals, progress is a word seldom used or seen. Today, I set eyes on the exception.

The Iraqi Hunting Club was an institution in its own right in the Baghdad of the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, the club was a state-of-the-art facility with its swimming pools, creativity areas, well-kept gardens, restaurants and celebration halls furnished by Italian and Finnish companies. It was founded in the 1920s, as its name suggests, for bird collectors and amateur hunters. It gave way to total renovations and alterations, decades later, sparing the name.

V.I.P.’s

It was at the club’s tennis tennis courts that I, and my children after me, learned the proper grip and how to play backhand shots. (Although my son recalls that they were shooed off the courts when Uday Saddam Hussein was about to show up.)

And, it was here, when I was 12 years old, where I almost bumped into a man strolling in the pathway. He looked down at me with piercing eyes. Even at a young age I immediately realized he was not a normal person, and it scared me. I sat down at my parents’ table and did not move for the rest of the evening. It was the first and only time I saw Saddam Hussein, live. Even though his presence was constantly sensed for years to come, from my living room TV.

The struggle to maintain the Iraqi Hunting Club continued through the 1990s, even though our children barely knew what a banana is, because of the western sanctions imposed on Iraq.

Oasis

But today the club is flourishing: the swimming pool water is clear and clean, the sauna is fully operational and a barber and hairdresser’s shop are open nearby. I wondered how the power and water supply are sustained, under such circumstances. At the gym, women were exercising vigorously, under the eye of a trainer.

As we walked to the main building, I noticed the empty gravel space has been developed to offer a variety of services: a new bank, a florist, a travel agency, a cellphone booth and an Internet cafe. Construction was well under way on quarters for newlyweds. On our way to the cafeteria, flower decorations were in pace, at the wedding hall. At another new construction, the Sun Hall, we sat down and ordered our coffees, enjoying a cool comforting breeze and comfortable sofas.

Two neatly dressed older men, one in a checkered blue and white shirt, were sitting together on armchairs, sipping Turkish coffee, each reading his newspaper. One glance told me that neither was looking over the political pages.

Our coffee was served in sparkling white cups labeled the Iraqi Hunting Club. I have not seen that for decades. Read more…

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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